Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

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Canada’s gradual shift to slick, cleaner, synthetic banknotes won’t just mean your money can stand more wear, will not tear and, for the first time, will be recycled into other products instead of destroyed.

The Bank of Canada and the RCMP hope that once the polymer-based notes are in circulation ”“ starting in November with the $100 bill ”“ they’ll also be all but impossible to fake.

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Fill in the blank: Just one short decade ago, about 10 percent of America’s corn went to ethanol. Now, the number is closer to _____ percent….

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NATO acknowledged Sunday that an errant missile had destroyed a civilian home in the Libyan capital in the early morning, saying it may have killed civilians. It was the alliance’s first such admission in the three-month-long campaign of airstrikes against the military forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Reporters taken to the site and a nearby hospital saw at least five bodies, including those of a baby and a child. Libyan officials said at least four more civilians were killed.

The episode was NATO’s second admission of a mistaken strike in two days….

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Coming soon to the Internet: website addresses that end in “.bank,” “.Vegas” and “.Canon.”

The organization that oversees the Internet address system is preparing to open the floodgates to a nearly limitless selection of new website suffixes, including ones in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. That could usher in the most sweeping transformation of the Domain Name System since its creation in the 1980s.

More than 300 suffixes are available today, the bulk of them country-code domains, such as “.uk” for the United Kingdom and “.de” for Germany.

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Between 01/2007-12/2009 in Leuven 17 isolated lung transplantations were performed from cardiac death donors, including four after euthanasia, Dirk van Raemdonck and colleagues (Leuven) report. “All donors expressed their wish for organ donation once their request for euthanasia was granted according to Belgian legislation. All donors suffered from an unbearable non-malignant disorder.” One recipient died from a problem unrelated to the graft. The other three patients are still alive ”“ in a good condition.

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The CIA is expected to begin operating armed drone aircraft over Yemen, expanding the hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in a country where counter-terrorism efforts have been disrupted by political chaos, U.S. officials said.

The plan to move CIA-operated Predator and other unmanned aircraft into the region reflects a decision by President Obama that the al-Qaeda threat in Yemen has grown so serious that patrols by U.S. military drones are not enough.

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People tend describe themselves as either pro-life or pro-choice. But a new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that the average American still holds conflicting views on abortion nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade. Evangelicals remain much more opposed to abortion than other Americans, but they, too, often do not fit neatly into pro-life or pro-choice camps.

PRRI Research Director Daniel Cox said, “For some time now, Americans have held a stable tension between two views: majorities both say that abortion is morally wrong and say that it should be legal in all or most cases. The binary ”˜pro-life’ and ”˜pro-choice’ labels don’t reflect this complexity.”

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Go here and his thoughts begin just past 1 hour and 45 minutes in and last a few minutes.

Please note that Dr. Wilkinson is particluarly well suited to speak to such a topic, since, as he says of himself:

Before working in Durham as a theologian, I was a scientist and then a Methodist minister in inner city Liverpool. My background is research in theoretical astrophysics, where my PhD was in the study of star formation, the chemical evolution of galaxies and terrestrial mass extinctions such as the event which wiped out the dinosaurs. I am a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and have published a wide range of papers on these subjects.

Oh, Facebook, here we go again.

The social media giant is facing a new wave of concerns over privacy protection after launching its latest feature, which allows users to identify their friends automatically in photos without their permission.

The photo tagging tool, called Tag Suggestions, was put into place in December, but it was listed as unavailable until recently.

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Promoting harmony between the scientific and Christian communities is a focal point of the 31st Annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University taking place June 16 to 18 on the Malibu, California campus. Current issues in the debate over the coexistence of science and faith such as stem cell research, conservation science, and finding the common thread between science and theology are among the many topics to be explored at the conference….

This year’s Keynoters are:

Francis S. Collins: “Reflections on the Current Tensions between Science and Faith”

John Polkinghorne: “The Quest for Truth in Science and Theology”

Simran Sethi: “Our Daily Bread: Food, Faith and Conservation”

Ted Peters: “Stem Cells: Who’s Fighting With Whom About What?”

You can check out the website here.

Living can be brutal. The other Dignitas customer in the programme ”” not filmed dying, but discussed up to the final handshake ”” is a 42-year-old man who tried suicide twice, failed, and took the journey to certainty. Again, earlier than he truly needed to. The window of opportunity, he saw clearly, would close as he travelled down “the narrowing alleyway” of disability….

The actual nature of the Dignitas experience….is grim. Even discounting the disgraceful fact that 21 per cent of its customers don’t have a terminal disease but depression, and that the Swiss authorities seem unwilling to intervene, there is something horrible ”” a condemned-cell atmosphere ”” about the process: the files, the signatures, the insistence that you practise drinking the stuff in one long draught “and do not sip”, the dreary environs, the anti-nausea drug taken beforehand so that Mr [Peter] Smedley observes how odd it is to be told “ten minutes more”.

Read it all (requires London Times subscription) and you may find a lot more articles on this there.

Parisian cemeteries are to enter an era of multimedia interactivity under plans to return the capital to what it sees as its rightful place at the cutting edge of change.

The high-tech cemeteries are among 40 plans unveiled this week as Paris Council seeks to transform a city widely seen to have fallen behind London, Barcelona and Berlin. Visitors to the graveyards will be greeted by touchscreens helping them to find the tombs of notable residents or relatives.

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…as with so many aspects of contemporary life, modern medicine overtook religious tradition. In 1981, a presidential commission set “brain death”””the end of all brain activity, including involuntary acts such as responding to pain””as the determination of life’s end. That definition became the standard in all 50 states and in many other countries, and religious communities generally lined up behind it.

But some Christian and Jewish leaders have recently been raising doubts about brain death. A 2008 front-page article in the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano called for revisiting the brain death definition. It echoed the sentiments of many pro-lifers who felt that the dying were losing out to a desire to cut medical costs or the urgent need for donated organs.

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Computer modelling based on the Voyager insights suggests the edge of our Solar System is a froth of activity, like “an agitated jacuzzi”, said Eugene Parker from the University of Chicago, US.

Magnetic field lines carried in the “wind” of material coming off our star are breaking and reconnecting.

This process is sculpting the wind into discrete bubbles that are many tens of millions of kilometres wide.

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Companies that are looking for a good deal aren’t seeing one in new workers.

Workers are getting more expensive while equipment is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people.

“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible,” said Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Everything should be as automated as it can be. We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs, especially when workers are getting even more expensive.”

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The UN nuclear watchdog is to report Syria to the Security Council over its alleged covert nuclear programme.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to rebuke Syria on claims of an undeclared nuclear reactor.

The structure, which Syria has maintained was a non-nuclear military site, was destroyed by Israel in 2007.

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China’s official Communist Party newspaper issued a caustic response on Monday to Google’s charge that Chinese hackers had taken aim at influential users of its Gmail service, calling the accusations “political gaming” aimed at fomenting new discord between the Beijing and Washington governments.

The newspaper, People’s Daily, published a front-page editorial in Monday’s international editions that also suggested that Google’s actions could cost it credibility in the business world.

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After venting out their ire against Sony PlayStation Network and Sony Pictures, hackers have pointed their guns at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The group LulzSec has hacked an FBI-affiliated website called InfraGard and siphoned off with the details of around 180 users. The attack was on their Atlanta chapter.

InfraGard is a government and private sector alliance which provides actionable intelligence to protect critical national information infrastructure. The website defines its role as: “InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.”

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Most of [University of Oxford Professor Robin] Dunbar’s research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed “Dunbar’s Number.”

Ironically, the term was coined on Facebook, where 150 friends may seem like precious few.

“There was a discussion by people saying ‘I’ve got too many friends ”” I don’t know who half these people are,'” Dunbar says. “Somebody apparently said, ‘Look, there’s this guy in England who says you can’t have more than 150.'”

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A new study may help explain why some military personnel exposed to blasts have symptoms of brain injury even though their CT and M.R.I. scans look normal.

Using a highly sensitive type of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied 63 servicemen wounded by explosions in Iraq or Afghanistan and found evidence of brain injuries in some that were too subtle to be detected by standard scans. All the men already had a diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury (synonymous with concussion), based on symptoms like having lost consciousness in the blast, having no memory of it or feeling dazed immediately afterward.

About 320,000 American troops have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them mild, according to a 2008 report by the RAND Corporation. The injuries are poorly understood, and sometimes produce lasting mental, physical and emotional problems.

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Monks and rabbis have stood alongside Catholics and Anglicans in Canberra to show support for the federal government’s plan to tackle climate change.

Leaders from the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC) met Prime Minister Julia Gillard in support of the carbon tax today.

Anglican representative George Browning said the group wanted to assist politicians to create good legislation and the message to Ms Gillard was that the issue was a moral one.

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Google Inc. is blaming computer hackers in China for a high-tech ruse that broke into the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists.

The breach announced Wednesday marks the second time in 17 months that Google has publicly identified China as the home base for a scheme aimed at hijacking information stored on Google’s vast network of computers.

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The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

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As the story goes, [Terrence] Malick began working on the idea for the film 30 or perhaps even 40 years ago. Reportedly, he spent years studying the origins of the universe and related science and technology with scholars. (A Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Malick taught philosophy at MIT before he started making films.)

Several critics have called “Tree of Life” Malick’s magnum opus, the culmination of all his artistic endeavors. Roger Ebert called the film “a form of prayer,” that created a “spiritual awareness” in the film critic, while eschewing “conventional theologies.”
Malick isn’t talking about his intentions. Notoriously private, he does not grant interviews and kept “Tree of Life” shrouded in secrecy from its inception until its recent screening at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film begins with a quote from one of the more confounding books of the Bible: Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”

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“On e-mail, people aren’t quite themselves,” they wrote. “They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.”

Oh, how times have changed. The idea that e-mail is chiefly a conduit for anger and lies seems almost quaint. After too may careers ruined and personal lives upended by online indiscretions, it should now be crystal clear that there are some things one must never, ever commit to e-mail.

And that’s why some bankers developed “LDL.” “LDL” ”” which means “let’s discuss live” ”” is an acronym that surfaced during the S.E.C.’s investigation of Goldman, Sachs for its role in the nation’s financial shame spiral. How do the pros use it? Goldman’s Jonathan Egol is the first known master. When a trader named Fabrice Tourre described a mortgage investment in e-mail as “a way to distribute junk that nobody was dumb enough to take first time around,” Egol shot back: “LDL.”

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India’s 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.

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It’s literacy center time in Mary Sires’ first-grade class, and students don’t even look up when visitors enter the room.

Students are absorbed in the day’s activities, which include using iPads to write and draw comic strips and reading books they’ve written on the small, tablet computers.

This technology has seized the attention of Sires’ students, roping them into lessons every day. It’s been instrumental in helping Sires give both her high achievers and stragglers the attention they need, and she uses the device as much as she can.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

A US man who was paralysed from the chest down after being hit by a car is now able to stand with electrical stimulation of his spinal cord.

Rob Summers, from Oregon, said standing on his own was “the most amazing feeling”.

He can voluntarily move his toes, hips, knees and ankles and also walk on a treadmill while being supported, according to research in the Lancet.

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In Denmark, sperm donation does not have to come with a name and telephone number – unlike in Britain and in a fast-increasing number of other European countries.

That has made Denmark something of a Mecca for foreign women who want to conceive by artificial insemination, because it has no shortage of officially screened and tested semen.

Danish clinics which provide insemination (often for a fraction of the price of similar treatment in the UK) have three main types of customer: lesbian couples, heterosexual couples and single women. It is the final category which is growing – by far – the fastest.

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